Those who work in research know that we live in a world that is strongly influenced by what Tricia Wang has called the quantification bias. More so than other forms of information, numbers have incredible formative power. In our culture, numbers are seen as trustworthy representations of reality...
Tag: data science
Just Add Water: Lessons Learned from Mixing Data Science and Design Research Methods to Improve Customer Service
Case Study—This case study provides an inside look at what occurs when methods from the data science and ethnographic fields are mixed to solve perennial customer service problems within the call center and cruise industries. The paper details this particular blend of ethnographic practitioners...
Human Sensemaking in the Smart City: A Research Approach Merging Big and Thick Data
This paper aims to contribute to the debate on the integration of ethnography and data science by providing a concrete research tool to deploy this integration. We start from our own experiences with user research in a data-rich environment, the smart city, and work towards a research tool that...
Contextual Analytics: Towards a Practical Integration of Human and Data Science Approaches in the Development of Algorithms
As algorithms play an increasingly important role in the lives of people and corporations, finding more effective, ethical, and empathetic ways of developing them has become an industry imperative. Ethnography, and the contextual understanding derived from it, has the potential to fundamentally...
Revitalising Openness at Mozilla: A Mixed Method Research Approach
Case Study—This is a case about how Mozilla, the open source browser company, set out to reconnect with ‘collaborating in the open’ to regain its competitive advantage. This case describes how a multi-disciplinary research team used ethnographic, market, and data analysis to articulate and clarify...
DIYing along with DIYers: Juggling with Scales During a Home-Improvement Research
As a team of researchers was asked by a French home-improvement retailer to redefine their strategy, they designed and carried out an ethnographic and quantitative research to identify new business opportunities. But no sooner had they set foot in field, they were struck not only by the richness...
How Is Evidence Created, Used & Abused? EPIC2018 Opening Remarks
We chose Evidence as the EPIC2018 theme in part to explore this question of why some things constitute evidence and not others. There are lots of factors we could point to, but since I’m standing next to a data scientist the first one I’ll talk about is digitization. Digitization changes how...
Tutorial: Doing Ethnography of Data Science & Algorithmic Systems
Description Approx 1 hr 43 min. This video presents the lecture portion of a half-day tutorial. Case studies and a...
Cross-disciplinary Insights Teams: Integrating Data Scientists and User Researchers at Spotify
Sara Belt and Peter Gilks respectively lead the Creator and Free Revenue Product Insights teams at Spotify. In this article, Sara will explore the practice of User Research at Spotify, and Peter will lay out how Data Science and User Research work together to drive product decisions. Part 1. User...
Integrating Data & Social Science
https://player.vimeo.com/video/897269896?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479 In Stripe Partners’ report The New Research Playbook, Stripe Partners outlined one important shift that practitioners need to embrace: the skillset shift from narrow user research to integrated data....